Talk:2019-06-27 Developer Diaries: Animation

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My name is Brad Constantine and I am a Senior Animator here at Intrepid. Well, being an animator involves the act of rigging the characters. We get a bind mesh from the modelers, we put a skeleton in that mesh, we bind the mesh to the skeleton, then we create a control rig to animate that character, and then we animate the character using the control rig. So my favorite thing here at Intrepid Studios is whatever I'm doing that day. I jump out of bed every day to come and do this, so I love doing combat, I love doing characters, I love doing windmills - there is no animation task that I don't love doing. Well, some of the most fun animations I've done so far are the combat stuff. I love that we have taken the time to start our combat early and work on it, so we can then iterate and make it better and better and better. I love doing the creature animations. One of the things that's unique about animating for an MMO is that as opposed to film we have to animate all of our characters in the round. So for example, if you see a character in a movie, it's generally from a fixed camera perspective. So when we animate for an MMO, we literally have to animate with the entire creature in mind, because you never know how you're going to see it in the game. So when we set up our creatures for animation, there's a lot of things that we need to take into consideration. One of them is if our creature is going to be wearing armor, and if that's the case then we have to be very careful on the way we move stuff, because we want to minimize the amount of inner penetration among the models, and we want it to look good. So, I have to say, it's a LOT of fun to work with our animators here in the studio. If I need a new animation for one of my combo attacks, I can just go upstairs and talk to Brad, and say, "Hey Brad, I need 3 attacks and they all need to be about 1.5 seconds long, and I kind of need them to have some weight to them. So if we have this two-handed axe, and it comes down really heavy like that, what could we do with that?" and Brad will have these fantastic ideas about all the details that we can pull out of that sort of conversation. It's a really awesome symbiotic relationship where I can come to animation with an idea, and they can take it to the next level. I think the main look that we were going for in Ashes of Creation is more of a realistic fantasy - a little bit more crazy over-the-top than Lord of the Rings, but also something a little bit more grounded; something that's not quite anime but feels cool. We want the players to feel immersed in this world, and we want your character to be an extension of yourself, and keeping things grounded that way with a little bit of the spice over the top I think really helps create a connection between the character and the person doing the play. Our animators and the rest of the people at the studio are super passionate about this project. We are doing something that's bleeding-edge, and so I think that creates this sort of excitement every day about - "What else can we do? How far can we push this?" and "How can we make sure that this all works at scale?" The one thing that I love about this project is the professionalism here at Intrepid. The level of experience in all my co-workers makes it exciting to come in every day. We're working really hard trying to make the best game possible, and we look forward to you guys enjoying the results of our efforts.